The names given to these small bodies commenced with the mythological army of divinities of the earth and ancient heaven; but even before the list had been exhausted certain scientific, or even national or political, circumstances caused the preference to be given to more modern names. It was thus that the 11th, discovered at Naples, received the name of Parthenope; the 12th, discovered in England, that of Victoria; the 20th, that of Massilia; the 21st, that of Lutetia; the 25th, that of Phocæa, before even Urania had been restored to the skies; the 45th was named in honor of the Empress of the French; the 54th, in honor of the illustrious Alexander von Humboldt; etc. The 87th, 107th, 141st, 154th, and 169th have been named in honor of a young astronomer who has devoted his best years to the culture of astronomy. A rather curious fact is that they have put Wisdom (_Sapientia_) in the sky only at the 275th, discovered in 1888; Bellona has been placed there since the 28th (1854). Of all this number of planets, the nearest to the sun is No. 149, Medusa, of which the distance is 2.17—that is to say, about twice as far from the sun as the earth; and the most distant is No. 279, Thule, of which the distance is 4.26, about 4¼ times our distance. A large number of these small bodies are remarkable for their great eccentricity and for their high inclination to the ecliptic, an inclination so great that some of them leave the Zodiac; thus, Pallas (2) goes 34 degrees from the ecliptic; Euphrosyne (31) and Anna (265) and Istria (183), to 26 degrees. They are sometimes northern circumpolar stars, always above the horizon, sometimes southern stars, not arising above the horizon of Paris. All these orbits are so interlaced with each other that, if they were material hoops, we could by means of one or two taken by chance raise all the others. Are they globes? Yes, doubtless, for the most part. But several among the smaller ones may be polyhedral, and may have proceeded from subsequent explosions; the variations of brightness which have been sometimes observed seem to imply surfaces irregularly broken.